Educator Mailboxes · educator.email
A professional mailbox for a teacher
Educator Mailboxes is one clean professional address for an individual teacher, adviser, or freelancer -- the weekly class update, the permission-slip reminder, the note to a single family. Mail goes out under the teacher's own name, family contact details stay inside our own private system instead of an outside marketing company, and a reply comes straight back to the teacher. It shares the educator name with educator.center, the teacher's daily classroom home, so one identity carries both the mailbox and the classroom site; the mailbox is the address, not the classroom tools themselves. The address is open to claim.
Example address: [email protected]. Checkout is not open yet — the figures further down are catalog estimates, not a charge, and no mailbox is created or billed.
Why this exists
Most teachers mail families from a personal account, because nobody gave them another one
That is not a criticism. It is the arrangement almost every teacher inherits on day one, and it works until it does not.
A personal address given to twenty-eight households is given to all twenty-eight of them, including the one you would not have chosen.
Three things follow from it, and none of them is about software.
First, the address is permanent in a way the posting is not. A teacher who changes schools, changes districts, or leaves the classroom does not get the address back off those contact lists. Second, the archive of what was said to a family lives in an account the school does not hold, which is a problem for the school and a burden for the teacher, who becomes the sole custodian of a record she did not want to keep. Third, the mail itself is worse: a reply from a parent arrives between a delivery notification and a bank alert, and gets read at the speed of the least important thing next to it.
A separate professional address fixes those three things and nothing else. It does not make anyone a better communicator, it does not write the difficult message, and it will not survive a district policy that says official mail lives on district systems. This page is about the part it does fix, and it is careful about the rest.
One thing said plainly before you read further: sending is not live yet. The mail server we run ourselves is written, and the latch that lets it accept a message is off until the endpoint is provisioned in our own network. A message today becomes a durable queued row and is recorded as queued, not sent.
A week of mail
Five messages, and the two questions that decide what happens to each
Does a family have to have agreed to it, and may it wait until morning? Every message a teacher sends answers those two questions, and the answers are set in code by what kind of message it is rather than by a setting on an account.
- Mon - The weekly class update
- Tue - The permission-slip reminder
- Wed - The absence notice
- Thu - The note to a single family
- Fri - The conference confirmation
Mon - The weekly class update
The weekly class update
One note to every family in the class.
Needs an opt-in — a family can refuse it Quiet hours may hold it until morning
This is the message that gets a teacher into trouble, and almost never for the reason she expects. It is not the content. It is that a class update sent to twenty-eight households from a personal account puts that personal address on twenty-eight contact lists, permanently, including the one household she would rather not have it.
Sent from a professional address, the reply comes back to a mailbox she can close at the end of a posting. Classified as a general update, it sits behind an opt-in, and every copy carries the unsubscribe affordance the mail standards expect, without her having to remember to add one.
packages/notifications/src/campaign/consent.ts:29 (the opt-in categories)
Tue - The permission-slip reminder
The permission-slip reminder
A nudge to the families who have not returned a form.
Needs an opt-in — a family can refuse it Quiet hours may hold it until morning
A reminder is a deadline message, and a deadline message is the one most likely to be sent at nine at night because that is when a teacher is finally sitting down.
If it lands inside a family's quiet-hours window, it is held to the end of that window rather than dropped. Holding keeps the message and moves it; dropping loses it and tells nobody. The difference sounds small until you are the person who assumed a reminder went out.
packages/notifications/src/types.ts (deadline_reminder)
Wed - The absence notice
The absence notice
A guardian is told their own child was marked absent.
Relationship mail — a promotional opt-out cannot stop it Quiet hours never hold it
This is about one family's own child, so it is relationship mail rather than a promotion, and a promotional opt-out cannot silence it. A family that unsubscribed from the newsletter still hears that their child was not in the room.
The template that renders it interpolates a first name only. The schema it reads from does not carry a last name, so there is no route by which a fuller name could arrive in the message even if a future author tried. That is the difference between a rule and a shape.
packages/notifications/src/templates/record-notify-templates.ts (absence_alert)
Thu - The note to a single family
The note to a single family
One reply, to one household, about one child.
Relationship mail — a promotional opt-out cannot stop it Quiet hours never hold it
The hardest message of the week and the one no software writes for her. What software can do is make sure that if the note is ever forwarded, shared, or read over a shoulder, it does not carry another child's full name or anything sensitive that drifted in.
Anything that could be seen by someone other than that guardian is reduced to a first name and a last initial before it goes into a message, and the composed body is scanned for sensitive patterns afterwards as a backstop. The backstop exists because template authors are human; it is not a substitute for the rules above it.
packages/notifications/src/privacy.ts:19 (firstNameLastInitial)
Fri - The conference confirmation
The conference confirmation
A guardian booked a slot and is told so.
Relationship mail — a promotional opt-out cannot stop it Quiet hours never hold it
A confirmation for something the family just did. It goes immediately, on every channel they are reachable on, and neither quiet hours nor a promotional opt-out can hold it. A confirmation that arrives tomorrow is not a confirmation.
The template carries an opaque handle for the staff member rather than a student's details, so the confirmation says what was booked without carrying a child's information into a message that may be forwarded to a co-parent, an employer, or a group chat.
packages/notifications/src/templates/conference-booking-confirmed-template.ts
Four things
Four things a teacher should not have to think about
Four, not ten. A list of ten controls is written for a procurement reviewer. This reader has a class in eleven minutes.
Whether the unsubscribe link works Working now
She has to remember to include one, and it has to still work later.
The unsubscribe target is a signed, stateless token that never expires, because a family may click a link in a message from last year and it has to still do something. It is verified rather than trusted: a malformed or forged token is refused with no database write, and a valid one is an idempotent opt-out. She does not add anything; it is on the message.
packages/notifications/src/unsubscribe-token.ts:64 (mint) · :94 (verify)
Whether an address has gone bad Working now
One dead address quietly poisons delivery for the whole class.
An address that hard-bounced, filed a complaint, or opted out globally is stopped at the transport, not at the campaign. It applies to every send and every caller, including a one-off note that never touched a planner, and it fails closed: if the check cannot answer, the send stops rather than gambling.
packages/notifications/src/delivery/suppression.ts:53 (suppressionGuard)
Whether nine at night is an acceptable hour Working now
She writes when she can, which is rarely when families want to hear.
A general update or a reminder that lands inside a family's quiet window is held to the end of it. Anything urgent -- a confirmation, an authentication link, a safety block -- ignores the window entirely and goes now. She writes when she writes; the system decides when it is polite to arrive.
packages/notifications/src/orchestration/channel-select.ts:191 (isInQuietHours)
Whether she just named the wrong child Working now
One forwarded message is one parent reading another child's full name.
Anything that could be shared or forwarded carries a first name and a last initial, produced by a function rather than by a habit, and the composed body is scanned for sensitive patterns before it goes. Neither of these is a setting she can get wrong.
packages/notifications/src/privacy.ts:19 · :62
All four are working today. None of them depends on the sending latch further down, because they are permission and safety controls rather than delivery machinery. That distinction is the reason this section can be honest and confident while the next one cannot.
The three options
The comparison where we lose the two rows that matter most to a cautious teacher
Kinds of arrangement, not named products. The last two rows go against us, and they are the two a careful teacher should weigh hardest before doing anything.
| What a teacher actually needs | Your personal account | A school-issued alias | A mailbox on this domain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your private address stays private | No -- it is on 28 contact lists | Yes | Yes |
| A reply comes back to you, not a shared inbox | Yes | Depends who else holds the alias | Yes -- your own sender name |
| You keep the address if you change schools | Yes -- and so do the families | No -- it belongs to the school | Yes -- the claimant holds it |
| Unsubscribe handling you do not have to remember | No -- you are the mechanism | Depends on the school's tooling | Yes -- signed token on the message |
| A bad address is stopped before it hurts the rest | No | Depends on the school's tooling | Yes -- address-level, fail-closed |
| A late-night reminder waits until a reasonable hour | No -- it sends when you press send | No | Yes -- deferred, not dropped |
| Satisfies a district policy that mail lives on district systems | No | Yes -- that is what it is | No -- ask your district first |
| Can send you mail today | Yes | Yes | No -- queued, and recorded as queued |
If your district requires official family communication to live on district systems, the school-issued alias is the right answer and this page is not trying to talk you out of it. A professional address of your own is for the teacher whose district has no such rule, or who is a freelancer, adviser, tutor, or coach without one at all.
What is live
The status board, placed above the pricing on purpose
Of the 6 things this page describes, 1 work today, 3 are built and switched off, and 2 are not built. Putting this after the prices would be the more comfortable order and the less honest one.
Delivering mail from our own server
Built, switched off
The server dialogue is written and the transport is built, and the latch that lets it accept a message is off until the endpoint is provisioned in our own network. A send today becomes a durable queued row and the system records it as queued, never as sent.
apps/api/src/services/comms-send-transport.ts:82 · :129
Signing mail so a receiving server can verify it
Built, switched off
The signing path and the canonicalization it needs are built. The key store is empty by default, so today a message is sent unsigned and flagged as unsigned rather than sent with a fabricated signature. Provisioning a key is an operator action, not a code change.
packages/notifications/src/mitto-dkim-signer.ts:123 · mitto-dkim-keystore.ts:38
Charging for a mailbox
Built, switched off
There is no checkout on this page and no signup that bills. The figures below are catalog display prices. Turning billing on is a founder decision and this page does not make it.
apps/marketing/src/mailbox/pricebook.ts (every figure is display-only)
Consent, suppression, quiet hours, name reduction
Working now
All four are built and run on every send. They are permission and safety controls and none of them depends on the sending latch above.
packages/notifications/src/campaign/consent.ts:103 and the modules cited above
Importing your existing mailbox
Not built
There is no automated migration. Forwarding from the old address plus a note on the way out is the honest first move, and we would rather say that than sell a migration we have not written.
no module -- this is an absence, stated as one
AI writing or rewriting anything on this lane
Not built
No provider is wired into this surface. A personalization pass exists elsewhere in the codebase, is fail-safe, is barred from transactional messages by a constant, and does nothing at all without an in-network provider injected. Nothing here uses it.
packages/notifications/src/ai/personalize.ts:83 · :109
The part most pages skip
Your district's policy comes first, and this page does not override it
Plenty of software aimed at teachers is sold past the district rather than to it, and the teacher is the one who finds out later that she was not supposed to use it. We would rather say this up front, at the cost of some sign-ups.
A few concrete situations, because the general rule is not much use on its own.
Your district issues you an address and requires family mail to go through it. Then use it. A personal professional address is not a way around that rule, and we are not going to pretend it is. The honest use for this address in that situation is the work that is genuinely yours: a tutoring practice, a coaching side, a conference talk, a freelance commission.
Your district issues nothing and expects you to sort it out. This is the common case and the one this address is for. You are already using a personal account; the question is only whether you would rather use a separate one.
You are an adviser, a coach, a tutor, or a substitute across several schools. Then there is no single school whose address would be right anyway, and one professional address across all of it is the arrangement that actually matches the job.
You are worried about what happens to the record. That worry is correct and we are not going to resolve it for you in a marketing paragraph. What we can say is what the address does mechanically: the mail lives in a mailbox you claimed rather than an account you already had, storage comes with it, and the message history stays searchable in one place. What counts as a school record, and who is required to keep it, is a question for your district and not one this page answers.
We describe how the thing works. We do not tell you what any rule requires of you, because we are not your district and not your lawyer, and a marketing page that pretends otherwise is doing you harm dressed up as a service.
Where AI is, and is not
Nothing here is written by AI. The full version of that sentence:
A message-personalization pass exists in the codebase. It would be dishonest to say there is no such thing, and dishonest to let you infer more than it does, so here is all of it.
It may touch a subject line and an opening line. Not a link, not an amount, not legal text, not a call to action, not the rest of a message.
It may never touch a confirmation, a refund, a payout, an authentication link, or a safety block. Those sit on a constant list of excluded message kinds, so they ship exactly as written every time. That is a structural exclusion, not a checkbox somebody could clear by accident.
It only runs at all when a caller injects a provider that runs inside our own network. Absent provider, out-of-network provider, any error, any guard trip, any detected leak: the original message is returned unchanged.
And on this surface, today: no provider is wired in at all. Every message described on this page is a written template with fields filled in. If that changes, this paragraph changes with it, and it will say so in the same plain words.
packages/notifications/src/ai/personalize.ts:83 (excluded kinds) · :109 (in-network-or-skip) · :184 (the fail-safe pass)
What a mailbox would cost
One tier, because one teacher is one mailbox. A catalog figure for planning, not a price you are charged.
Solo $3.00 per mailbox / month
Catalog price — not a charge
Includes 1 mailbox · 10 GB each.
One clean professional address for a single teacher, adviser, or freelancer.
At the included 1 mailbox, that is about $3.00 / month at catalog rates — an estimate, never billed.
This is the only single-seat plan in the whole catalog. Every other address in this family is priced for an office, a department, or a studio. That is not an accident of pricing; it is the shape of the reader this page is written for.
What is true today
Catalog prices, not a charge
The figure above exists so a teacher can decide whether this is worth ten minutes of thought, not because you can buy right now.
There is no buy button on this page. There is no signup that bills. Turning a mailbox on is a founder-confirmed step and it is currently off.
- Prices shown are catalog estimates, not a charge -- checkout is not open yet.
- Mailbox provisioning is a founder-confirmed step and is currently off; no mailbox is created and no card is billed.
- A branded address is a professional mailbox, not a claim that any specific school or studio uses it.
Nothing on this page creates a mailbox or moves a cent. When that changes, this page will say so in the same plain words it uses now.
Boundaries
What this is not
A page that only lists what a product does is half a page. These are the six things a teacher would otherwise reasonably assume, and each one is a no.
Not a classroom platform
No gradebook, no assignments, no seating chart, no behaviour points. It is an address and an inbox. The classroom surface is a different product with its own page, and the mailbox does not pretend to be it.
Not a parent-messaging app
There is no separate app for families to install and no in-app chat. Mail arrives as mail, in whatever the family already reads, which is the whole reason a family actually sees it.
Not a way around district policy
If your district requires family mail on district systems, this is not a workaround and we will not sell it as one. That rule belongs to your employer, not to us.
Not a compliance product
We describe mechanisms. We do not tell you what any rule requires of you, and we do not certify anything. A marketing page is the worst possible place to get that kind of answer.
Not a live sender yet
The owned mail server's accept latch is off. A send today becomes a durable queued row and is recorded as queued. Nothing reports a delivery that did not happen.
Not a migration service
There is no automated import from an existing mailbox. Forwarding plus a note on the way out is the honest first move, and saying so costs us less than being caught claiming otherwise.
Questions
What a teacher asks first
Can I send mail today?
No. The owned mail server's accept latch is off until the endpoint is provisioned in our own network. A send becomes a durable queued row and is recorded as queued rather than sent. We would rather tell you that than show you a tick mark.
My district gave me an address. Should I use this instead?
Probably not for official family mail. If your district requires that mail on district systems, use what they gave you. This address is for the teacher whose district has no such rule, or for the tutoring, coaching, advising, or freelance work that is genuinely yours.
Does a family have to install anything?
No. It is mail. It arrives in whatever they already read, which is why they actually see it.
If a parent unsubscribes, will they stop getting absence notices?
No. An absence notice is about their own child and is classified as relationship mail, so a promotional opt-out cannot silence it. That classification is set by the kind of message, in code, not by a setting on your account.
I write at nine at night. Is that a problem?
Not for you. A general update or a reminder that lands inside a family's quiet window is held until the end of it rather than dropped. Anything urgent ignores the window and goes immediately.
What if I accidentally put another child's name in a note?
Anything that could be shared or forwarded is reduced to a first name and a last initial by a function rather than by your memory, and the composed message is scanned for sensitive patterns as a backstop. The backstop is a net, not a permission slip; the rules above it are the real control.
Who can see my families' contact details?
They stay inside our own private system rather than being handed to an outside marketing company, and they are not sold. We do not claim the mail is untouchable or that it can never leave; we run the system ourselves and keep the handling tight, and that is the honest version.
What happens to the mailbox if I leave the school?
The address belongs to whoever claimed it, not to whoever set it up. That is the point of a professional address of your own rather than a school alias. It also means the school does not hold that archive, which is a real trade-off and worth thinking about before you move official correspondence onto it.
Can you move my existing mail across?
No. There is no automated import. Forwarding from the old address plus a short note telling families the new one is the honest first move.
Does anything here use AI?
Not on this surface. A personalization pass exists elsewhere in the codebase, is fail-safe, is barred from confirmations and authentication links by a constant, and does nothing without a provider that runs inside our own network being injected. None is wired in here, so every message is a written template with fields filled in.
Is the price going to be what is shown?
We do not know yet. It is a catalog figure for planning. Checkout is not open, nothing is billed, and the number exists so the thought can be finished.
Asking a question
There is nothing to sign up for here, so the only thing to do is ask something. A real answer comes back, including when the answer is that we have not built the thing you asked about.